Thursday, January 20, 2011

Blog 3 - "Rightsizing" Images for the Blog

Students, you will be posting digital photos often to your blog, so this first digital editing exercise is one you will put to use early and often. Don't post more picture than you need! A size of 800 x 600 with a resolution of 72 dpi is plenty! (OK - 96 dpi if you got a Mac.) Let Tommy's Joynt help explain...
I've posted two pics below of a cool restaurant I visited in San Francisco. Do you notice any difference?

The first one is untouched exactly as it was downloaded from my iPhone. Go ahead, click it. HUGE Picture! Over a 1.2 MEG!*

The second one is the same photo - but reduced to 800x600 in size with a resolution of 72 dpi. perfect size for web viewing and only a fraction of the size - only 140k! (and a fraction of the upload/download time!)

Of course, I saved the smaller pic under a new name so I could keep the higher res photo for later use. This tip will save you lots of time in posting, so practice it early and often. (Dr. Howard's videos will provide much more material for you to continue to deveop your image editing skills, but this skill you will use many times!) You can do this in any photo editing program. I use PhotoShop on my lab computer, PaintShopPro on my home computer and GIMP on my laptop.

About Me

Randy D. Nichols is a life-long learner and communicator who now learns alongside college students as they engage the ever-shifting literacies of our modern digital world. He has a passion for engaging communication issues with fellow-communicators in the workplace, community, and the classroom.

His creative approach to forging communication solutions out of available (or easily obtainable) resources is part of what makes him the "McGyver of Communications." He enjoys bringing a "rhetorical imagineering" to his courses, seminars and speeches - and is happy when his ideas are adopted, modified, augmented, re-mixed and shared with others. (He wears his Creative Commons T-shirt with pride!) Dr. Nichols shares a multitude of curated resources with educators and communicators at his RhetoricSoup.com website. Randy D. Nichols, Chair of
Limestone’s Dept. of Communications, is featured in the new book, Mobile
Technologies and the Writing Classroom. Nichols worked with fellow Clemson
Doctoral Alumna, Dr. Josephine Walwema, to contribute a chapter titled
"Untangling the Web through Digital Aggregation and Curation" to this
new NCTE publication. This chapter outlines an approach to encouraging students
toward a more "critical consumption" of digital resources by using
free and popular tools for mobile devices, such as Flipboard and Pinterest, and
even includes a sample lesson as a "play exemplar" for fellow
educators to revise, rework, subvert and remediate.

Dr. Nichols is energized by communicating, not only inside the college classroom, but outside as well. He enjoys speaking to emerging young scholars at events such as the Olde English Consortium and the SC Teacher Cadets events. He also values his opportunities to speak at, and learn from, events such as the Popular Culture Association Conferences, and the Conference on College Communication and Composition.